Virtualization

3rd Stratus Special Edition

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 Virtualization For Dummies,® 3rd Stratus Special Edition
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 Introduction
T hese days, most businesses use virtualization technology
in some fashion. This book provides you with a brief intro-
duction to the subject, discusses cloud technology, and helps
you understand the various options regarding availability for
virtualized environments. Knowing all this can help you create
an action plan as you move forward with the next phase of
your virtualization strategy.

About This Book

This book focuses on the importance of having the right
hardware infrastructure underneath your virtualized environ-
ment. Here’s why: With multiple virtual machines running on
a single physical host, a hardware failure has much broader
impact than the traditional one application/one server model.
In today’s always-on world where nearly everything is con-
nected, ensuring availability of your physical infrastructure is
especially important.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book, you find a series of icons in the mar-
gins that help to flag special information.

This icon alerts you to information that is especially impor-

tant to remember.

This icon flags a shortcut or some information that’s really

useful.

This icon flags technical information that is helpful to know,

but not really essential.

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 2 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

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 Chapter 1

Virtualization: More Than a

Technology Fad!
In This Chapter
▶ Looking at virtualization’s roots
▶ Understanding that virtualization is a viable technology
▶ Using virtualization for important business tasks

I n the last few years, using virtualization has become stan-

dard practice in organizations of all types and sizes around
the world. But although it seems like a relatively new tech-
nology that’s recently become common, it’s actually an old
friend. In fact, virtualization was used in mainframe comput-
ers back in the 1960s.

Why has virtualization become popular again? Simple: It saves

money. That’s because virtualization allows multiple instances of
an operating environment to run on a single piece of hardware.
These virtual machines — or VMs — run applications and ser-
vices just like a physical server, but without the cost of a physi-
cal server. So by having multiple VMs on one physical host, you
can support a lot more applications for a lot less money.

What Got Us Here?

Virtualization is the result of a natural evolution in the com-
puting world and a response to growing economic pressures.

As you probably know, at one time, mainframes ruled the com-

puter world. But a lot of organizations wanted more flexibility
to carve up workloads for different departments or projects

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 4 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

and give them dedicated resources for better performance

and more capacity. This was the birth of client-server comput-
ing. Usually one application ran on one server accessed by
many different clients (PCs). The emergence of x86 technol-
ogy also made client-server computing cost effective.

But was it too much of a good thing? Before long, everybody in

an organization wanted servers for his or her particular applica-
tions. That resulted in something called server sprawl — servers
filling up every inch of the data center.

So this is where the economic angle comes in. All those serv-
ers need power, and electricity isn’t getting cheaper. A room
full of servers generates a lot of heat, requiring more air con-
ditioning. All of this drives up costs dramatically, which is bad
enough in the best of times. During economic slowdowns, it
wreaks havoc on the bottom line.

Then virtualization for x86 technology came along — just in

the nick of time. All of a sudden, one physical server could
become multiple virtual servers, providing all the isolation
and resources needed by each application.

Problem solved — partly.

Virtualization: What’s old is new again

Although it might seem like the latest
and greatest thing in technology,
virtualization is actually a venerable
and well-established computing
concept.
As long ago as the 1960s, IBM pro-
vided the capability to “timeshare”
its mainframes. This concept, radi-
cal in its day, subdivided a machine,
allowing multiple programs to exe-
cute within an operating system
and share the operating system’s
resources (not too different from
what Windows or Linux do today).
IBM then created the capability to
run multiple virtual machines on its
mainframes. Each VM looked exactly
like the underlying physical machine,
and each VM could have its own
operating system.
So, even though it seems like virtu-
alization is a brand-new phenom-
enon, it has a long history. It’s just
that virtualization is no longer lim-
ited to mainframes; it’s been turned
loose into today’s x86-populated data
centers.

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 Chapter 1: Virtualization: More Than a Technology Fad! 5

Hey, This Stuff Works

Early on in the rise of x86 virtualization there was significant
doubt among IT and business people alike. Despite a compel-
ling financial benefit, there remained big concerns. What if the
virtualization layer (called a hypervisor) didn’t work? Already,
it was clear that many systems could fail with one fault in the
virtualized environment.

Therefore, organizations started out virtualizing only their non-

production systems, like development and testing. But pretty
soon, these organizations saw that the hypervisors delivered
the stability and performance they needed. And they began
­virtualizing production workloads, too.

Next Stage: Business-Critical

Applications
The benefits of virtualization — like lower costs, more agility,
better hardware utilization — proved significant, so it wasn’t
long before IT organizations wanted to virtualize all their
applications, including their most important ones. This task
wasn’t difficult, but the risks were now substantial. It meant
putting a lot more faith in the hardware.

Would you trust running dozens of virtualized business-critical

applications on the hardware you have today? Suppose you
had 20 critical VMs on one server and it failed? How long would
it take to fix the problem? And what would that downtime cost
your business?

Now you understand: Hardware in virtualized environments

is more important than ever. It simply must be available if
you’re going to trust it to host your most critical business
applications.

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 6 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

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 Chapter 2

The Forecast Is Cloudy with

a Chance of Confusion
In This Chapter
▶ Getting to know the cloud
▶ Understanding where the cloud came from
▶ Looking at virtualization and the cloud
▶ Examining cloud limitations

M any of the technologies related to virtualization seem

confusing, especially when companies recycle the same
ideas with new names — like cloud. That’s why it’s important
to cut through the fog and see how cloud computing really
matters to you.

You Say Cloud, I Say

Timesharing
It seems like a law was recently passed prohibiting any discus-
sion, presentation, or book on IT that doesn’t mention cloud
computing. But what is it — really?

In a cloud, computing is a service that you can acquire as if

from a utility. Instead of computing resources being local, work-
loads are processed on systems that could be anywhere. You
get to them through a network connection, but their physical
location doesn’t matter. The cloud service provider usually pro-
vides you with a service-level agreement for added assurance.

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 8 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

Remember the timesharing concept in the early days of virtu-

alization? Cloud computing takes timesharing to a whole new
level because the pools of virtualized resources that are time-
shared are much bigger today than was possible in the past.
This allows organizations to use cloud computing to perform
highly complex calculations using shared resources, which
is much more cost effective than building and maintaining a
local infrastructure.

Old Concept, New Technologies

Just like virtualization, cloud computing has its roots in the
1960s. Some computer scientists in the 1960s predicted that
computation would be similar to an electric or telephone grid.
In fact, many older IT diagrams included an image of a cloud,
which represented the network. This is where cloud computing
gets its name.

However, it took the Internet’s ubiquity to make cloud com-

puting practical. Using high-speed connections over long
distances, nearly anyone could use public cloud services.
And now, many organizations are bringing the cloud right into
their own data centers. This private cloud concept is a great
way to transform your IT organization into a service provider
and offer cloud-based services to your internal customers.

The Role Virtualization

Plays in the Cloud
Almost all cloud computing uses virtualization to make effi-
cient use of resources. Whether the solution is a public cloud,
private cloud, or a hybrid (combining public cloud, private
cloud, and/or a noncloud environment), virtualization is the
abstraction engine that moves things around in the cloud
without impacting the applications or physical servers.

Limitations of Most Clouds

A lot of organizations are excited about cloud computing
because it’s so flexible and scalable — thanks to being virtu-
alized. They can also save money with clouds compared to
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 Chapter 2: The Forecast Is Cloudy with a Chance of Confusion 9
building out traditional infrastructures. But clouds have their
limitations.

First of all, moving applications into the cloud is tricky. In fact,

it can be downright risky. Most applications require some
level of work to operate properly in a cloud environment, and
according to CloudTP, 50 percent of them need replatforming,
or refactoring.

Then there’s the matter of availability in the cloud. Traditionally,

applications relied on the hardware to ensure availability.
However, clouds are typically built on large numbers of com-
modity servers to keep costs down. Multiple points of failure
in these systems are a given. That means the applications have
to take care of ensuring availability — more work, more time,
more expense, and more risk.

There aren’t a lot of availability solutions for the cloud, and

most that do exist are still immature. Virtual machines can be
monitored and restarted on other hosts, but that takes time
and risks data loss if you happen to have transactions going
on during the restart. There are some open-source tools if you
don’t mind more custom development, lots of configuration
work, and pulling your hair out to support them. Of course, you
can rewrite your applications to build in availability capabilities.

And the truth is, not every application needs the same level
of availability. So on top of everything else, you could face
tedious scripting to create appropriate availability policies for
each application.

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 10 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

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 Chapter 3

Virtually Everything
In This Chapter
▶ Using virtualization for everything
▶ Making sure your hardware is perfect for virtualization

T he exponential growth of computing power, the adop-

tion of automated processes to replace manual tasks, the
increasing cost to power a multitude of computers, and the
need for greater agility to avoid business disruption — they
all cry out for a more efficient way to run data centers.
Virtualization is a solution for many of these problems.

Not Just for Servers Anymore

Physical desktop computers — and even laptops — are expen-
sive to update and support. Plus, a lot of people these days
want to use their own device (like a tablet or smartphone) at
work. Or they want to access their business applications from
home.

So why not create a bunch of desktops on the virtualization

platform? Many organizations have done just that, with some-
thing called a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In fact, busi-
nesses are increasingly turning to VDI to improve security,
meet compliance requirements, and regain enterprise-wide IT
control while offering flexibility to users.

VDI usually involves creating individual desktop environments

on virtualized servers running in the data center or cloud. A
connection broker acts as the traffic cop, directing requests
from users from across the enterprise to the right place in the
VDI to get their personal desktops.

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 12 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

Core VDI components, such as the connection broker, are

business critical. If the host servers supporting the virtual
desktops fail, many users are affected and work comes to a
standstill. Therefore, a resilient availability solution built to
prevent server downtime should be part of your VDI deploy-
ment plan.

The virtualization craze also extends to storage, with many

storage arrays and storage area networks now being virtual-
ized. Whether you’re talking about the desktop, storage, or any-
thing else, all those things share the server as a common hub.

With a virtual desktop, the applications and the majority of

your data reside on a server. Storage is useless unless it can
be accessed and processed through a server. This is why
the availability solution you choose to protect the server is
critical.

Hardware Expectations in a

Virtualized Environment
Virtualization changes the traditional hardware expectations
of IT shops. It used to be that most companies owned a few
business-critical applications that necessitated highly avail-
able hardware, along with a bunch of less critical applications
that ran on commodity servers.

In a virtualized infrastructure, all those less critical applica-

tions become business critical because they’re aggregated
on a few physical servers running many virtual machines. So
their loss has much greater business impact.

And it’s not just your applications. The management compo-

nents of your virtualized environment are equally important.
If management services went down, you’d no longer be able to
create and manage VMs or virtualized workloads, resulting in
another source of costly downtime.

Because different applications have different availability

requirements, it’s important to have an availability strategy
that properly aligns infrastructure with the application mix.
This is the key to delivering service levels that match the criti-
cality of each application.

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 Chapter 4

Application Availability in
an Always-On World
In This Chapter
▶ Examining the nines
▶ Introducing the fifth nine
▶ Knowing if you’re fault tolerant
▶ Looking at how Stratus can help

T he paradox of virtualization is that it removes hardware

dependencies while making hardware more important.
When an individual physical server must support many work-
loads, even noncritical applications become critical when
viewed as part of the collective business process.

Although a number of solutions can improve the availability of

applications, fault tolerance is the only way to ensure applica-
tions are always on.

The Nines
If 100 percent is perfection, then 99.999+ percent availability is
the Holy Grail. What do most availability solutions attain? Try
plain old 99 percent. That’s right, an average x86 server will
often deliver 99 percent availability for the service running on
it. This may seem pretty good, until you consider what this
means to your organization.

Two nines of availability (99 percent) means a system has

unplanned outages totaling 87.6 hours a year — and you don’t
get to choose those hours. Now consider that, according to

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 14 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

Aberdeen Group, an hour of downtime costs the average com-

pany $163,674.14. You do the math.

It’s relatively easy to go to three nines — 99.9 percent. All it takes

is a good server with redundant power supplies, fans, a RAID
array, and a habit of following good business practices. This
will get you down to about 8.76 hours of unplanned downtime
a year. That might seem like a big jump, but a day’s downtime
during peak processing periods can still wreak havoc on your
bottom line.

Climbing up the scale to 99.95 percent uptime often involves

cluster technology. Typically referred to as a high availability
(HA) solution, clusters involve connecting two or more physical
servers in a single network. If one server goes down, applica-
tions start up again on the other one. Some cluster solutions
claim 99.99 percent (52 minutes of downtime a year), but this
requires a really well-built cluster with an application that can
failover very quickly. Many commonly clustered applications
such as databases can’t failover that quickly because they must
check file integrity and replay transaction logs after the failure.

So the Holy Grail for any system is five nines — 99.999 percent

availability — which translates to a bit more than five minutes
of downtime a year. In order to hit this number, you need to
avoid system failure in the first place, rather than try to recover
from it.

Understanding Fault Tolerance

Fault-tolerant systems do more than simply recover quickly
following an outage — they work through faults and continue
to run without disrupting applications at all. In that way, they
prevent downtime from happening in the first place.

There are hardware and software solutions to achieve fault

tolerance. Fault-tolerant hardware solutions consistently
deliver 99.999 percent or better availability, which is less than
five minutes of unplanned downtime a year.

Software fault tolerance is similar, but different. This approach

uses two industry-standard x86 servers running in parallel.
The fault-tolerant software enables a single application to
live on two virtual machines simultaneously — one on each

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 Chapter 4: Application Availability in an Always-On World 15
physical server. If one VM fails, the application continues to
run on the other VM with no interruptions or data loss. Simple
as that.

So You Think You’re

Fault Tolerant
Even though most virtualization solutions have ways to handle
server failures, they usually involve failing over and recovering
or restarting on another host. Failover routines and restart-
ing VMs require downtime — precious time business-critical
applications can’t afford to lose. It’s better to prevent downtime
from happening in the first place.

Failover techniques — typically using clustering — get you

to a level of three to four nines. But they’re not fault tolerant.
A failure still occurs. To recover from a failure, applications
must be restarted on a healthy system. In most cases, this
requires applications that are cluster aware and may involve
extra scripting by your IT staff. Yet, despite all this extra work
and complexity, any data being written to disk when the fail-
ure occurs (otherwise known as in-flight data) is lost.

None of this is an issue in true fault-tolerant solutions. No

additional configuration work or system modifications are
necessary. You simply get downtime prevention and data pro-
tection right out of the box.

Stratus Helps Prevent Downtime

All fault-tolerant solutions aren’t created equal. Some virtualiza-
tion solutions emulate software fault tolerance but end up cre-
ating lots of overhead, which drags down performance. They’re
also typically limited in how many processor cores they
support, which can be a problem for performance-intensive
applications that require multicore symmetric multiprocessing
(SMP). You need true fault tolerance to avoid performance
problems and meet all your application requirements. That’s
where Stratus comes in.

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 16 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

Whether protecting select virtualized applications, an entire

private cloud, or a hybrid environment, Stratus solutions
can prevent downtime before it occurs and ensure uninter-
rupted performance of essential business operations.

Stratus also provides excellent customer service. Stratus’s

team of availability experts are always available, providing
proactive availability monitoring, management, and support
around the clock, around the world.

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 Chapter 5

Getting the Right

Availability Where and
When You Need It
In This Chapter
▶ Looking for always-on software
▶ Finding fault-tolerant platforms
▶ Seeking availability for the cloud

S ystem and application failures happen. That’s a fact of

life in IT. The question is how well your infrastructure
handles the failures. This chapter discusses the important
ways Stratus helps you get the availability you need, wherever
you need it.

Always-on Software
Stratus’s software-defined availability helps prevent downtime.

Most other solutions rely on recovering from a fault, usually

by failing over VMs to another host and restarting the applica-
tion. That means there will be at least some downtime. But
Stratus’s software works right through failures, so you have
continuous availability. No failover or restarts necessary.

Stratus’s software uses something called an Availability Engine,

which mirrors an application so it runs on two different servers
at the same time. You can use almost any industry-standard x86
server and easily create VMs to run your apps.

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 18 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

If one of the servers has a problem, your applications c

­ ontinue
to run on the other server while you fix the problem. There’s no
disruption to users and no lost data.

Fault-Tolerant Platforms
If you need a completely integrated, always-on solution, Stratus
availability platforms could be the answer to your dreams. These
fault-tolerant systems are known for maintaining continuous
availability in some of the most demanding environments in the
world.

Stratus platforms combine hardware, software, and service out

of the box. There are two of everything on these platforms —
CPUs, memory, I/O, disks, and power supplies — all working in
synch as a single system. If a component fails, its twin compo-
nent takes over instantly without causing performance degra-
dation, lost data, or downtime. There is absolutely no need to
reboot or failover.

Stratus platforms are easy to set up and there’s no need to

modify your applications to run on them. Maintaining them is
easy, too. Each platform has built-in software that automati-
cally detects and prevents many causes of downtime.

The onboard software also enables remote service and sup-

port by Stratus availability experts. But if you ever do need
to replace a component, Stratus will ship a new one to you
overnight. Components are easily replaced without tools or
computer skills — and, of course without downtime.

Availability for the Cloud

Stratus can also help you work more efficiently in the cloud.

Stratus’s openstack-based cloud workload management solu-

tions consist of workload services and availability services that
significantly reduce the effort of bringing applications to the
cloud and providing those applications with the availability
they need.

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 Chapter 5: Getting the Right Availability 19
Stratus Cloud Workload Services provide the following benefits:

✓ Get your applications into the cloud quickly and easily

with the Service Catalog.
✓ Reduce costs by using only what you need — when you
need it — with Dynamic Availability.
✓ Maximize ROI using one solution for all your applications
with Intelligent Orchestration.
✓ Provide full visibility with reporting, altering, and
notifications.

Stratus Availability Services let you define exactly the level of

availability you need, whether building a cloud from scratch
or integrating availability into an existing cloud infrastructure.

Instead of relying on hardware availability or custom-written

policies for each application, Stratus’s software-defined avail-
ability approach lets you easily assign just the right availability
environment to every type of application requirement on com-
modity servers.

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 20 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

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 Chapter 6

Ten Things to Keep in Mind

When Virtualizing Those
Business Apps
In This Chapter
▶ Don’t build a house of cards
▶ Service is key

H ere are ten key things to keep in mind when virtualizing

business-critical applications:

✓ Remember that virtualization makes hardware more

important, not less. Even though virtualization is a soft-
ware application, it enables you to run more systems on a
single server — so the server becomes more important. If
the server crashes, all the operating systems and applica-
tions (VMs) on that server come tumbling down as well.
✓ Evaluate your current computing environment. Your
computing infrastructure is made up of a wide variety of
applications — some mission-critical, some important
to daily work tasks, and some that are called on during
peak periods. Virtualization is a good opportunity to
take inventory and figure out how many of each type you
have.
✓ Keep your nines in mind. When it comes to servers, the
important number is nine. With standard availability of
99 percent, you can expect to have days of downtime
every year — instead of the five minutes or less you can
get with 99.999 percent availability from Stratus.

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 22 Virtualization For Dummies, 3rd Stratus Special Edition

✓ What level of availability is right for you? Clusters

recover after failure has already occurred; their tragic
flaw is that they don’t prevent failure from happening in
the first place. Stratus always-on solutions help prevent
downtime in the first place with multiple hardware and
software resources running in parallel. If one resource
fails, another is already working on the same instruction
and transparently continues operating as normal.
✓ Move into the cloud with confidence. Stratus Cloud
Workload Management Solutions significantly reduce
the effort of bringing applications to the cloud and let
you easily define availability levels, including continuous
availability, in the cloud with software.
✓ No modifications required. With such powerful always-on
platforms and software, it’s easy to think that you would
have to modify your applications to take advantage of
them. Not so with Stratus, where you can immediately take
advantage of its platform and software-defined availability
solutions without changing a thing.
✓ Remember the role service plays! A resilient availability
platform is just one piece of the pie. If a problem does
arise, it’s nice to know that Stratus availability experts
can remotely resolve it for you so you can sleep soundly.
✓ Long live those legacy apps. Another benefit of virtual-
ization is the capability to continue using legacy appli-
cations running in older operating environments that
may no longer be supported. You can simply load those
legacy apps onto a virtual machine and continue running
them without a problem. It’s a great way to extend the
life of older applications and avoid costly migrations.
✓ Don’t overlook virtualization management. The ease of
creating new virtual machines has led to a new term: VM
sprawl, referring to the fact that virtualization can make
new systems multiply like rabbits. That’s why it’s impor-
tant to use an appropriate virtualization management
tool, and configure it on a platform that ensures manage-
ment capability is always available.
✓ Plan your end-of-project party! This phase of your virtu-
alization project is the easiest one of all. Use the time and
money you’ve saved to hire the best caterer, bartender,
and entertainment.

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